The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome

by Michael Hoffman

  In terms of our personal experience, it was not long ago that we were observers at a well-attended lecture by a “traditional” Catholic university professor who had no qualms about offering encomiums for Plato as a guide to the sapience from which Catholics would profit. We know of an international “traditional” Catholic school-system for women in which formation in “Catholic wisdom foreshadowed by Plato,” is a staple. Popery is inherently Neoplatonic to such an extent that awareness of it among papists is virtually nil. There is almost no vigilance in these matters in the quotidian world of Rightwing Catholics, who otherwise pride themselves on ferreting out the influence of “Protestants and Freemasons.”

  Rev. Fr. Ficino was a chameleon and the intensity of his occult teachings waxed and waned with the response to them. When informed conservative Catholics with influence, like Antonio degli Agli 36 and Bartolomeo Scala, began to warn against Ficino in terms of “fools who philosophize with the pagans,” 37 Ficino would, in the aftermath of this cumulative and mounting criticism, late in life in private letters to Martinus Uranius and Zanobi Acciaiuoli, regret what he claimed were his youthful indiscretions. These private remarks of his have been recycled to allegedly prove that Ficino was a good and pious Catholic after all. This claim overlooks the fact that a “good and pious Catholic” would have repudiated his heretical books in public and showed where they were defective and ordered them withdrawn. The public Ficino refrained from any evidence of true repentance, however. We are expected to accept that his ruse in a few letters to correspondents represented a sincere change of heart. If sincere, a change of heart, in Catholic theology, requires an attempt at reparation and restitution, by undoing damage that has been done. Instead, Ficino enjoyed the privilege of having his occult works seep into the Church over five centuries: “After Marsilio Ficino published it in 1489, his Three Books of Life (De vita libri tres) enjoyed great success. Almost thirty editions by 1647, made it the most influential account of magic of its day, perhaps of all Western history.” 38

  Ficino’s template of occult belief and covert action by elite insiders of the Church, coupled with the spectacle of outwardly pious, ceremonial orthodoxy maintained for the masses of Catholic laity, was rigorously adhered to by the papacy from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century, until those same masses had been sufficiently conditioned over time by a control system of unconditional obedience to the pontiff, and gradual exposure to a soft version of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic theology. By 1965 they were prepared to reluctantly submit, however grudgingly at first, to the early stages of the radical public alterations of the Faith which the occult ideologues of the hierarchy now projected in the open. Consequently, by the pontificate of Pope Francis, the people had been for decades deeply immersed in the later stages of the foreordained “solve et coagula” crucible of human alchemy.

  The demonic magic of the Asclepius distinguishes it as among the most Satanic of the texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. “Magic comes closest to philosophy…in the famous ‘god-making’ passages of the Asclepius which show that material objects can be manipulated to draw a god down into a statue and thus ensoul it.”39

  As part of this “drawing down,” the magician, according to the Asclepius of Hermes, obtains the power to “ensoul” dead matter. Because there was no analogy with digital AI (Artificial Intelligence) or robots in that bygone era, the power of the sorcery was described as having the capability of “bringing statues to life.”

  In his Summa Contra the Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas put forth a refutation of the alibis and specious justifications which apostate Christians offered for their conceited involvement with the occult. In this regard, the saint chastises Hermes by name, reiterating the condemnation of St. Augustine:

  “The position of Hermes is disposed of by these considerations, for he spoke as follows, as Augustine reports it in the City of God: “Just as God is the maker of the celestial gods, so man is the maker of the gods who are in the temples, content in their nearness to man. I mean the animated statues, endowed with sense and spirit, that do such great and unusual things; statues that foresee future events, predicting them from dreams and from many other things, that cause weaknesses in men and also cure them, that give sorrow and joy, in accord with one’s merits.

  “This view is also refuted by divine authority, for it is said in the Psalm (134:15-17): ‘The idols of the Gentiles are silver and gold, the works of men’s hands. They have a mouth and they speak not…neither is there any breath in their mouths.” 40

  In the third volume of his De vita trilogy, the De vita coelitus comparanda (“On obtaining life in the heavens”), Fr. Ficino impresses upon the minds of his Catholic readership his “lofty spiritual teaching” concerning what he regards as the benevolent utility of the Egyptian magic of Hermes, notwithstanding Aquinas:

  “When any (piece of) matter is exposed to superior things…immediately it suffers a supernal influence through that most powerful agent, of marvelous force and life, which is everywhere present…as a mirror reflects a face, or Echo the sound of a voice. Of this Plotinus gives an example when, imitating Mercurius, he says that the ancient priests, or Magi, used to introduce something divine and wonderful into their statues and sacrifices. He (Plotinus) holds, together with Trismegistus, that they did not introduce through these things spirits separated from matter (that is demons), but mundana numina…Mercurius himself, whom Plotinus follows, says that he composed through aerial demons, not through celestial or higher demons, statues from herbs, trees, stones, aromatics having within them a natural divine power (as he says)….

  “There were skillful Egyptian priests who, when they could not persuade men by reason that there are gods, that is some spirit above men, invented that illicit magic which by enticing demons into statues made these appear to be gods….

  “I at first thought, following the opinion of the Blessed Thomas Aquinas, that if they made statues which could speak, this could not have been only through stellar influence but through demons…But now let us return to Mercurius and to Plotinus. Mercurius says that the priests drew suitable virtues from the nature of the world and mixed these together. Plotinus follows him, and thinks that all can be easily conciliated in the soul of the world for it generates and moves the forms of natural things through certain seminal reasons infused with its divinity. Which reasons he calls gods for they are not separated from the Ideas in the supreme mind.’

  “An interpretation of this passage is that Ficino used to agree with Thomas Aquinas, who explicitly condemns as demonic the magic in the Asclepius, but since he has read Plotinus’ commentary he (Ficino) understands that, though there may have been bad Egyptian priests who used demonic magic, Hermes Trismegistus was not one of them. His power came only from the world, from his insight into the nature of the All as a hierarchy in which the influence of the Ideas descends from the Intellect of the World, through the ‘seminal reasons’ in the Soul of the World, to the material forms in the Body of the World. Hence, celestial images would have their power from the ‘world’ not from demons, being something in the nature of shadows of Ideas, intermediaries in the middle place between Intellect and Body, links in the chains by which the Neoplatonic Magus operates his magic and marries higher things to lower things.

  “Thus the magic of the Asclepius, reinterpreted through Plotinus, enters with Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda into the Neoplatonic philosophy of the Renaissance, and, moreover, into Ficino’s Christian Neoplatonism. The latter feat necessitated, as we have seen, much ingenious evasion of authoritative Christian pronouncements.” 41

  Man, the occult Catholics tell us, has been endowed with special powers of creation—not the least of which is bringing dead matter such as the building blocks of sculpture, marble and clay—to life, a feat consonant with the legendary creation of the golem by the sixteenth century rabbinic Kabbalist, Judah Loew of Prague.

  What have these works of darkness and megalomania to do with Jesus Christ? Catholic Rena
issance magicians like Ficino and Giovanni Pico were the apotheosis of Satanic pride and they spread that spiritual contagion throughout the Church, by means of much ingenious evasion of authoritative Christian pronouncements.

  Ficino’s published volumes were public texts and the sorcery and syncretism he advocated were little different from what Giordano Bruno would put forth in the next century, but Fr. Ficino was subservient to the papacy and Bruno was not, and there rests the difference. When a curial investigation of Ficino was proposed in 1489, it was quashed. Bruno meanwhile, was burned for advocating what Ficino’s books had taught him, whereas Ficinio did not experience a single hour in any prison or before any Catholic court or tribunal. His heresy was notorious and it was perpetrated for decades in Florence, 170 miles north of the Vatican. Yet throughout his life and career he was completely immune from interdiction or repression of any kind. This immunity was not unique to Marsilio Ficino.

  1 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 11.

  2 Moshe Idel, “Jewish Kabbalah in Christian Garb,” in Kabbalah in Italy: 1280 to 1510 (2011), p. 234.

  3 Yates, Giordano Bruno, pp. 80, 82-83.

  4 Along with Plato’s four major theological successors: Neoplatonism’s founder, Plotinus (see pp. 85-86), his pupil Porphyry (234-305); as well as Iamblichus (see p. 90), author of On the Egyptian Mysteries (translated by Ficino); and the Neoplatonist systematizer, Proclus (412-485).

  5 The perennial philosophy has exponents on the Left and the Right. The former are more familiar in popular culture: the comparative religious studies departments of colleges and universities, the New Age movement, and writers such as Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith and Aldous Huxley. On the Right, in addition to the Renaissance “Catholics” who pioneered it and made it their specialty, such as the curator of the Vatican library, Agostino Steucho (1496-1549), the perennial philosophy is a fixture of the movement centered around Rene Guenon, and further to the Right, Julius Evola.

  6 This is the universalism of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic theology. It is a solvent—the universal distillation of all of the gods of the pagans into one syncretic religion of demons (I Corinthians 10:20-21). To the contrary, the true Roman Catholic Church’s self-description as universal (catholic) is a reference 1. to the offer of God’s grace to all mankind; and 2. the theology of the Eucharist as described by the Apostle Paul, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The attempt to conflate occult universalism with the universal ecclesia of Jesus Christ is a fool’s errand.

  7 Jean Seznec, p. 98.

  8 Curl, The Egyptian Revival (2005), p. 90. Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Owen Davies, Gimoires: A History of Magical Books, p. 46.

  11 Yates, Giordano Bruno op. cit.,, pp. 13-14.

  12 Divine Light, pp. 71; 74 and 75.

  13 In other words, Pseudo-Dionysius.

  14 John M. Dillon, “Dionysius the Aeropagite,” in Interpreting Proclus: From Antiquity to the Renaissance (2014), pp. 111-112; 118-119; 121.

  15 Charles A. Anderson, Philo of Alexandria’s Views of the Physical World (2011), p. 191.

  16 William A. Dennison, Paul’s Two-Age Construction and Apologetics (University Press of America, 1985), pp. 9-10.

  17 Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (1978), pp. 251-253.

  18 Sometimes known by his acronym the “Ramban,” (not to be confused with Moses Maimonides referred by the acronym “Rambam”).

  19 Other mystical terms in the context of ma’asei merkava (the “doctrine of the soul and the economy of justice”), include sod ha’ibur (the secret of passing from body to body), and ituk (soul relocation).

  20 Kabbalat ha-nevi’im, i.e. the traditions of Kabbalah.

  21 Brian Ogren, Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah, p. 103.

  22 Unfortunately, Friar Paul presented arguments in line with Ramon Marti’s defective anti-Judaic polemic, Pugio fidei; among these was Marti’s assertion that the Talmud—and similar rabbinic sacred texts—prove the Messianic identity of Jesus, including Marti’s absurd contention that Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 43a gives evidence of Jesus’s royal descent from King David, when it does no such thing. 43a actually testifies to the fact that the Roman government in Palestine (in other words Pontius Pilate), sought to acquit Jesus of the capital charge against him, which had been insisted upon by the Jewish leaders. Cf. Ursula Ragacs, “Reconstructing Medieval JewishChristian Disputations,” in Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference (2015), p. 107.

  23 Cf. Herbert W. Basser, “Kabbalistic Teaching in the Commentary on Job,” in Biblical Interpretation in Judaism and Christianity, pp. 97-98.

  24 The name Tamar denotes “date palm.”

  25 “Judah saw there (in Adullam) the daughter of a Canaanite man, whose name was Shuah. And he took her and entered into her and she conceived and bore a son and called his name Er. And she conceived and bore a son still again and she called his name Onan. And again she bore a son and called his name Shelah.” Genesis 38: 2-5.

  26 The Zohar Volume Three (Stanford University, 2006), p. 144.

  27 The union between Ruth and Boaz was levirate and levirate unions survived into the time of Christ (Matthew 22: 23-24).

  28 The Chumash (Brooklyn, New York: Mesorah Publications, 2009), p. 209.

  29 The Midrash Says: The Book of Beraishis (Brooklyn, NY: Bnay Yakov Publications, 1999), pp. 364-365; 367.

  30 The Chumash op. cit.,, p. 211.

  31 Ellen Myers, “Thomas Molnar: A Christian Scholar for our Time,” in Creation Social Science & Humanities Society Quarterly Journal, (vol. 9, no. 4, 1987).

  32 Nahamanides, The Writings of Rabbi Moses ben Nahman, vol. 2, p. 265.

  33 Ogren, op. cit., pp.115-116;121-122.

  34 Numerous Catholics wear the scapular without magical intent: solely as an outward sign of their inward commitment to the Biblical virtues which Mary embodied. In those cases the scapular functions as a symbol of Christian faith and not as an amulet.

  35 John De Marchi, Fatima From the Beginning, transl. I.M. Kingsbury (Edicoes Missoes Consolata, 2006) p. 198. No accusation of wrong-doing is directed against this child for how her alleged statement was exploited by the Church of Rome. At the end of her brief life she stoically endured the torments of botched medical care for the influenza which killed her. She had been a witness to extraordinary events at the Cova da Iria (“Cove of Irene”) in Fatima, Portugal in 1917, for which science has no explanation.

  36 Antonio degli Agli, De mystica statera (Naples, circa 1456), quoted in Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence, pp. 173-174.

  37 Scala, Epistola de nobilioribus philosophorum sectis. Scala’s work affords us the opportunity to second his judicious approach toward the admirable qualities of ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero where they reflected the Natural Law, while rejecting syncretism and the occult. For Scala contra Ficino cf. Alison Brown, Bartolomeo Scala, 1430-1497, Chancellor of Florence (1979), p. 219; and Hanegraaff, Esotericism, p. 44.

  38 Brian P. Copenhaver, “How to do Magic, and Why: Philosophic Prescriptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (2007), p. 137. The first edition of Ficino’s De vita libri tres was published in Florence by Antonio di Bartolommeo Miscomini. It was reprinted in Venice in 1498; then in Bologna in 1501 by (Benedetto Faelli); with 27 additional editions up to the early modern period.

  39 Copenhaver, Hermetica, p. xv.

  40 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 3, ch. 104, p. 93 (1956 Image Books edition translated by Vernon J. Bourke and reprinted by the University of Notre Dame in 1975). Also see chapters 105 (“Where the Performance of the Magicians Get their Efficacy”), and 106: “That the Intellectual Substance which Provides the Efficacy for Magic Works is not Morally Good.”

  41 Yates, Giordano Bruno, op.cit., pp. 66-68.<
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  Chapter V

  Pope Alexander’s Wizard

  “Pico’s vision of the dignity of man, of man’s transformative power as magus, owes a profound debt to his fellow Florentine Marsilio Ficino’s recuperation of the ancient hermetica and of the reputation of its alleged author, Hermes Trismegistus. Together, Ficino and the younger Pico resurrected earlier traditions, some of them highly unorthodox, to give birth to a vigorous progeny, Renaissance magic.” 1

  “Not until Pico della Mirandola did a Christian attempt to use cabalistic doctrines in a distinctly positive way, in support of Christian truth for Christians.” 2

  Giovanni Pico, the young Count of Mirandola, was profoundly influenced by a declaration in the Asclepius, which he subsequently fashioned into an escutcheon of the Catholic Renaissance and its new magical understanding of the “dignity” of man. The Asclepius had proclaimed to the immense satisfaction of Pico and the popes and prelates who followed and shielded him: “Magnum miraculum est homo, animal adorandum et honorandum” (“Man is a great miracle, a living being to be adored and honored”).

  Humans are indeed a miracle of God and as images of the divine they are due the dignity conferred upon them by their Creator. Our attention is drawn to the self-worship principle being established by this maxim of which Giovanni Pico was so enamored, which is also a principle evinced in the dogma and practice of Orthodox rabbinic Judaism. Here again we identify a primary characteristic of the occult mentality: the narcissism of devils.

  The Pharisees criticized Jesus for teaching and conveying the secrets of the universe, how it functioned and the meaning of life, directly to the peasants of Israel (the am ha’aretz), who were castigated by the Jewish religious elite for their “ignorance” of the Oral Law that would be, a few centuries later, committed to writing as the Mishnah and later, the Gemara, forming the Babylonian Talmud. Jesus Christ was engaging in the anti-occult act par excellence: freely teaching everyone, of whatever rank or status, both high and low; rich and poor alike. Those who had ears to hear and eyes to see were not excluded from knowledge by an Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian caste system or hierarchy. He violated the twotier system of law and justice which is the mark of any despotism: one law for the “insiders” and another for the masses. The test of the justice of any code of law or legal system is its universality: does it apply to everyone?